danwells

Moof! I'm wondering if this has to do with Apple spinning out in house software to avoid anti-trust issues? Many of the potential (and some actual?) lawsuits around the App Store have to do with Apple both running the store asnd offering products in it. Would just taking the products external (everything from iWork (Pages, Numbers, Keynote) to Final Cut Pro) solve the problem, or would they have to spin off the services (Apple Music) as well?

 I can't imagine the internal software has any great impact on revenue - they wouldn't mind losing Final Cut, FileMaker is already semi-external, and most of the rest are free (or bundled with the OS). iWork could even be a modest new revenue source to Claris if unbundled. They don't have to unbundle Mail or Safari, because Microsoft bundles Outlook Express and Edge, and Google bundles Chrome and a Gmail app - browsers and mail are accepted parts of the OS.

If they managed to spin off the software to avoid challenges to the much more valuable services, it's almost certainly worth it to them...

The other use (besides tower away from monitor) is stuffing a RAID in a closet - RAIDs tend to be noisy contraptions. Does the leak show any pricing? I can see two ways it might work - optical (which could open lengths of hundreds of meters), or additionally amplified. Present active TB cables are boosted on the ends, as I understand it. Could this contain an additional booster amplifier in the middle? TB3 can carry quite a bit of power, so there's no problem powering the (sub 1 watt) booster unit. I've seen over-length USB cables that work this way, and (while I've never seen it in a single cable), Ethernet signal boosters that connect two cables together while amplifying the signal also exist. I can't imagine that adding more than one amplifier is either practical or cost effective, so the "amp in the middle" trick would be limited to ~4 meter cables - after that, you'll want to be optical.

This card is essentially the Radeon Vega 64 that shows up in the higher-end iMac Pro (there may be modest differences in clock speed, etc.). The iMac Pro version has 16 GB of RAM, just like the WX 9100. Unfortunately, Vega 64s available separately have 8 GB. Unless you really need the 16 GB for a very RAM hungry task, or you have an application that uses the WX series workstation drivers, a standard $600 Vega 64 in the same eGPU box should perform similarly. I'm not sure that the certified drivers issue even exists on Macs? On the PC side, the GPU manufacturers write more stable drives that enable specific features in CAD software and a few other pro applications (not including Photoshop and friends) that work only with the "workstation" variants of cards. Many of the Radeon WX and NVidia Quadro cards are just the gaming GPU, sometimes actually downclocked a bit, sometimes with more RAM or some other minor variation, sold for 2-3x the price with a minor firmware tweak that enables the workstation driver. At the high end, there are workstation cards that use different GPUs.

Unless you know you need the certified workstation driver for some particular application, just use a Vega 64...

I hope that, by the time Sierra is released, this will be extended to the iPhone as well, rather than used as a ploy to sell the Apple Watch. It would be perfectly easy to do the same thing with an iPhone, which most Mac owners have (there are so many more iPhones out there than Macs that I'd assume the Mac/Android combination is somewhat rare (or owning a relatively expensive recent Mac but no smartphone at all)). Of course, you can still unlock your Mac the old way if you prefer Android or don't have a smartphone - but MANY more people could use auto-unlock if it worked with the iPhone.

This will depend heavily on third party application support. Apple's own applications had better support it, and I'd be relatively certain that Microsoft won't in any meaningful way, since Office is essentially a straight Windows port. One big question is going to be Adobe - their very complex applications could make a lot of use of the OLED bar, and they're more Mac-oriented than Microsoft (they have something like a 40-50% Mac customer base to Microsoft's ~5%). They're unfortunately also pretty conservative about design. The second question will be the mess of small developers in the creative world... If Apple makes it easy to develop for, you could see a lot of smaller audio/video/photo software developers working with it.

The second question is how widespread it becomes, and that will depend on how it spreads through the Mac line, which in turn depends on the cost. Every previous programmable interface like this has been very expensive (the Art Lebedev designs, which range from a few hundred dollars for a few buttons up to $1500 for a complete keyboard, have been all over this thread, and similar concepts have shown up in audio and video control surfaces). In order to get the third party support it needs, the control strip needs to be cheap enough that it moves throughout the Mac line, including the external keyboard (an additional peripheral that clipped to existing keyboards would make a lot of sense to anyone except Jony Ive)! The Magic Keyboard is already expensive - the price of a nice mechanical keyboard for a sleek-looking membrane model with no number pad. They'd have a hard time selling many people a $200+ keyboard, and they couldn't include it with iMacs without bumping the price up.  

Adobe's not going to do anything with much it if it's MBP only - if it comes with a full refresh of the laptop line (except the 12" MacBook), that's interesting, especially if they also introduce an external keyboard and even more so if they are able to get the price down far enough to bundle that keyboard. If any Mac you buy except the Mini and the 12"MacBook has a touch strip (yes, I'm assuming they'd throw the keyboard in with a Mac Pro), plus you can retrofit one to any Mac that runs the latest OS, that's enough to interest folks...